Category: Stuff I fix

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Wake On LAN

For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to send a “magic packet” from my laptop to my desktop in order to power on my desktop machine remotely. Unfortunately my old ass motherboard didn’t support it which was always a source of frustration.

my old ass dusty motherboard

Then I bought a new Raspberry Pi 5 because they released a new version which had 16G RAM which I desperately needed to build some software. When I bought the Pi I also bought an NVME HAT and a new 1TB NVME. Unfortunately something wasn’t working but I wasn’t sure what was causing the error. So I went ahead and bought a new NVME from Crucial via Amazon and it worked first time. So I knew the NVME was at fault and returned it to Pimoroni expecting a refund. I didn’t get a refund, I got a replacement.

My old ass motherboard had an NVME slot so I thought “oooh, I don’t really need a 4th drive in this desktop machine but I’ll plug it in anyway”. So I took it apart, plugged in the NVME drive, put it all back together and booted it up. Nothing, except for the dreaded BIOS beeps of death. 5 of them – which means something is wrong with the motherboard or the processor. Expensive. “No worries” thought I – I’ll just take out the NVME drive again. Took it apart, removed the NVME, put it all back together. 5 beeps. Damnit.

This desktop machine has been my workhorse for about a decade. When I first got it I absolutely maxed it out. It was beautiful. Silent. Fast. Compiled code in seconds. However, it seems taking a ten year old motherboard and plugging in a cutting edge NVME drive wasn’t a great idea.

I did some research and went for a reasonable Ryzen motherboard with a new AMD processor. £200 for the pair and my existing DDR4 RAM was compatible. The MoBo arrived and I ripped the entire machine apart. Came to put my RAM in and realised the new board only had 2 DDR4 slots – whereas I had 4 8G DDR4 modules.

So I fired it up with 16G RAM. Tried to do a build whilst some background processes were running and ran out of memory. This would not do. I quizzed Oli about his machine and he had 32G made up of 2 * 16G modules. So we swapped. It was a win win. I got 32G again and Oli got 32G but the RAM I gave him was faster than the RAM he had. Since he’s a gamer he’ll benefit from faster RAM – about 50% faster. To me the speed of RAM didn’t really matter so much.

Get to the point Darren!

After a few weeks of my new AMD Ryzen motherboard I once again remembered my goal of being able to do a WOL [ Wake On Lan ] – I did a quick check on the motherboard and it indeed supported Wake-On LAN.

So…..I set up a systemd job to enable Wake-On LAN each time it boots and I can now finally fire up my laptop and run a script which basically does:

wakeonlan <MAC ADDRESS>

and as if by magic my desktop starts up and gets on with doing it’s thing whilst I eat breakfast.

So I now have a slightly faster, slightly quieter desktop again and I haven’t quite got around to testing if the replacement NVME drive works anywhere.

Clouds, silver linings and all that.

But hey kids, in general if your machine is working fine and you don’t need another 1TB of storage then just leave it alone. Put the NVME in the spares cupboard and get on with life. But WOL is cool 🙂

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Bench Repairs

John, my father in law : “Darren, could you have a quick look at our garden bench and give it a quick tidy up?”

Me : “Sure, shouldn’t take long”

2 months later :

Every single screw, nut and bolt was rusted. They all had to be drilled out, chiseled out, or angle-grinded off.

The wood was rotten in a few places so that had to be chiseled out and filled with wood filler.

Two of the slats were too far gone to be saved so I had to go out and buy new slats that were about the right size and then plane them down to be close enough to the originals so that it wasn’t too noticeable.

The metal work was all scrubbed down and painted with some metal paint and then the whole thing had to be reassembled. I think Oli and I may have put the back rest on upside down though.

Still, I was pretty proud of the end result.

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Three stripe dog walk

For quite a while I’ve been suffering from either Plantar Fasciitis or a bit of a bruised heel. No idea which and it doesn’t really matter. It’s bloody painful – sometimes. Anyway, in an attempt to not hobble around like an old man I’ve been taking ze hound for a walk in my trainers for a while. This is fine at the moment in a beautiful British Summer, but I’ll have to go back to my boots in the Winter. Walking in my trainers does seem to have improved things but recently disaster struck.

My sole became disconnected from my heel. I spent the rest of the walk with a funny flapping slapping noise coming from my foot as I hobbled along.

The day it all began

My trainers are currently in my garage waiting for a bit of super glue but I’m pretty sure a bit of plastic or rubber or something fell out of the heel as I walked so I’m going to walk the same route a few times and see if I can find the fally outy bit before committing to glueing the trainers back together

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Tesla air filters

I noticed that my air con didn’t seem to be quite as effective as I thought it should. It could just have been my imagining things as the UK was bloody hot at the time, well, you know, by UK standards. It was either get the air con system re-gassed or put some new air filters in as they may have become blocked. A bit of googling and it seems the air filters should be changed every two years. The car is now five years old and I can almost guarantee they’ve never been done – so that was the first stop.

Order new air filters

Watch youTube video about how to replace air filters

Rip car apart and change filters

It wasn’t a particularly tricky job, but laying on your back across the door frame looking up underneath the steering wheel to remove some air vent ducting was a trifle uncomfortable.

Air filters replaced. No real noticeable difference in the air con but the UK has cooled down a bit now so no rush. I’ll probably start investigating re-gassing the system soon. Maybe it can wait until Spring – we’ll see